Feeling reminiscent on how much fun I had on my first playthrough, I downloaded Penny's Big Breakaway and went for a second.
I regret it. Let's go over why:
The Good:
+ Visuals: Very bright but pleasing, filled with popping pastel colors and inventive ways they catch your eye, ranging from the poles you swing around to the platforms you bounce on to even the designs of the characters. Speaking, the characters are a smorgasbord of fun shapes and colors, and any dialogue they get gives them some fun personality, even if the voice-acting of the cast is just noises like Banjo-Kazooie characters and Penny is just a silent protagonist.
+Level Design: Each stage are super fun to navigate, with a lot of verticality, mechanisms and power-ups to mess with. You can destroy objects and blockades, yo-yo ride up walls, ride ziplines, get shot out of cannons, ride water jets/air vents, bounce off trampolines, yo-yo-ride on water, etc. There's so much to do. That said, the levels are pretty linear, with some occasional forks in the road for Dilemmas or Show Pieces.
+ Sound: The music is fun and fits the themes of the worlds, with some interesting twists; for example, the desert world has an Arabic aesthetic, but also has some funky twang to it. I like the touch of making it dynamic if you have a Penguin stuck to you. The sounds of swinging up a pole, bouncing of a trampoline, or hitting someone with your yo-yo all have distinct sounds that actually kind of fit with their design.
+ Gameplay: It's a 3D platformer with insanely impressive movement. You're able to bounce around and swing and dash and speed through each level. Jumps that shouldn't look possible totally can be done through experimenting with momentum and well-timed inputs. Each level gives you Dilemmas, where you have to perform a specific task for an NPC, and gather both coins and collectibles called Show Pieces per level. Doing these, coupled with finishing the level as fast as possible, nets you even more points at the end of the level. Busking, a QTE minigame at the end of each level, can help you in a pinch if you feel like you need a boost to your score. When you can land on the highest platform in the center, you get more QTEs, get a higher amount of bonus points, and get more coins for items in the item shop. Also, as you collect Show Pieces, you can trade them in for bonus levels called Snow Globes - these are challenge bonus levels made to really test your Movement. They add more to the game, and despite being locked by a collectible, seeing the inventive ways Evening Star designed these levels is cool.
The Bad:
- Gamebreaking Bugs: some people have it different depending on their level, but in my case, I cannot progress through level 6-2 because the cannon shoots me into the wall instead of across the chasm. This was during 2026 on my second playthrough, never happened in 2024 on my first. I went from Proton Hotfix to Experimental, then to 11, 10, 9, and even 8.0.5, which played the game at 1/4 speed, and I did all of this while using SteamDeck=1 %command% in advanced launch options to make the game use Steam Deck presets, since I hear the game runs better on both Decks and consoles; it still happens. I had the save file from 2024 with all of the levels completed, so I went to level 6-3 to see if it's like this for more than just that cannon. It's not: the cannon in 6-3 shot me into the void instead of progressing me through the level appropriately. This leads me to believe ALL the cannons are broken. I EVEN SWITCHED MY DISTRO FROM BAZZITE TO CACHYOS, AND THE CANNON BUG STILL HAPPENED! This is a gamebreaker. No two ways about it. With the last update to this game being in March 2024, I have zero hope the devs at Evening Star will ever address or fix this.
- Collision/level geometry: sometimes during either a yo-yo ride through a baseball mitt, or even just interacting with a rounded edge in some of the levels, Penny will freefall like she's gone offstage, but won't make contact with the ground until after a few seconds. This is occasionally funny but mostly a pain, as it breaks your combo and kills you.
- Game Engine/Game Physics: the game's FPS is tied to the physics. I found this out when I turned off Vsync and the game speed broke like a vase trapped in a china shop with a bull; I immediately thought of Fallout 76 and my heart fell out of my ass. It's historically common to program games like this, but this is a poor practice in modern game development, since this causes physics to run faster on high-end hardware and slower on low-end hardware, leading to inconsistent gameplay experiences and in many cases breaking the game.
- Combos/Scoring/Postcards: These three topics are interconnected, so I rolled them into one: the scoring in the game is determined by your combo. The more tricks you do, the bigger the combo, both the flat value and the multiplier, and the bigger the score. But spamming the same tricks nets you less points, which is supposed to incentive creativity. Getting a high enough score at the end of most levels nets you a postcard, but missing your quota means you have to start over if you want it. This isn't an issue: the issue is how fickle continuing a combo often is: the most "reliable" methods I've been using to keep up my combos are b-hopping, yo-yo riding, and getting a whirl ready while I'm in the air. However, "reliable" is in quotes big enough to use as cell towers: Your combo drops the microsecond you hit the ground, or you can make Kevin Garnett blush with how much travelling you're doing and the combo keeps going. Couple that coin-toss with dropping a combo whenever you take damage or a Penguin latches onto you like a leech, and having to interact with objects for progression, solving Dilemmas, and/or collecting Show Pieces, and your chances of getting a high score become much slimmer. You either
a) have to go out of your way to stop what you're doing, do your chores and accept a combo drop,
b) try and multitask (hit or miss, depending on the level), or
c) ignore them and just bounce on a trampoline for 30 minutes and finish the level and hope you got enough for the postcard.
*You should not have to invest several minutes in a level to completing Dilemmas and hunting down Show Pieces, then dedicate another however many minutes in that same level to mindless Tony Hawk-esque tricking and mental arithmetic to determine what score you need to do to maybe get a JPEG at the end.*
The Ugly (my own personal gripes/opinions, so don't let these influence your experience):
= Coin Shop: The coins you collect throughout your playthrough can be used in the shop for items which give you get-out-of-jail-free cards, such as escaping one capture by the Penguins, or point steroids like the spotlight that gives you bonus points during the Buskers, assuming you did the level hitless. This is either a godsend or a waste depending on how good you are at platformers.
= Boss Battles: It's a platformer, I'm not expecting God Hand or something with a lot of depth to boss battles. Each boss battle involves either hitting something 3 times back at someone, usually to go do a thing, or pulling back on something and letting go. The "do-X-things-to-Y-enemy-Z-times", while serviceable, is lacking in innovation and originality, but that's just me.
Overall:
Despite all of the good this game brings, it is anchored by and drowning in bad. Some silly glitches like bouncing off of rounded terrain can be forgiven, since it's a matter of positioning; being hardlocked out of the game through no fault of my own is unforgivable and completely unacceptable. If you have a console or a Steam Deck, you should be fine, but coupling all these issues with the inconsistent and finicky combo system and I can't bring myself to recommend it, at least not on PC.
